Pressplay to start offering unlimited downloads of their online music database. While it still only (leagally) allows users to burn 120 songs to disc, there are rumors of allowing permanent d/l of songs, too. Is this a sign of the music industry finally starting to do what they should have done from the start, which was embrace the medium and capitalize on its benefits rather than try to stifle it? Regardless of whether or not pressplay suceeds with this tactic, is there anything legal online music services can do to compete with free p2p networks? Discuss.
posted by Hackworth
on Aug 2, 2002 -
25 comments

It is not a crime to look at bomb-making websites... or so says Lieutenant Jason Ciaschini, police spokesman in Punta Gorda, where a Briton who was using a computer to look at bomb-making websites is now being held at Charlotte County Jail on immigration violations.
Florida police had evacuated the library and arrested him after he looked at bomb-making websites, and found suspicious liquids in his backpack.
"Looking up stuff on the Internet - everybody has freedom to do that," he also said.
posted by Blake
on Jul 30, 2002 -
6 comments

A ray of hope: Internet Radio Fairness Act . Disappointed in the Librarian of Congress' recent imposition of high fees on web radio broadcasters and the resultant shutdown of many web radio broadcasts (including KIRO and KMTT in Seattle), U.S. Reps. Jay Inslee [right] (D-WA), George Nethercutt [below] (R-WA), and Rick Boucher (D-VA) introduced new legislation to change existing web radio laws.
posted by y2karl
on Jul 26, 2002 -
22 comments

Bait and Switch? (Quicktime Movie) - One of the Mac Faithful at fury.com makes a funny (but true) statement about the new .Mac service charge that Apple recently announced. How far can Apple push their core consumer market with this type of thing? In a News.com report, Apple predicts losing up to 90% of their existing .Mac users. That's some public relations plan. They are indeed thinking differently.
posted by Argyle
on Jul 26, 2002 -
27 comments

Sign up to fight the filters. As filters get piled upon filters it gets difficult to tell whether the document requests fail due to technical problems or due to active denial. These folk are developing a distributed application which will use idle cycles to map out the boundaries of filter space and help fight the cantonization of the Net.
posted by srboisvert
on Jul 24, 2002 -
4 comments

After the outrage about NPR's linking policy, they've written a new one. The ombudsman explains what happened.
posted by jaden
on Jul 22, 2002 -
20 comments

Here's a simple example of a potentially interesting art project. Fill a Usenet post with words specifically chosen to create art based on Google's search word highlighting. Not sure if it's art or spam, but I am waiting for the first ASCII artist to step up to the plate and do something complex like the Mona Lisa.
posted by willnot
on Jul 21, 2002 -
10 comments

Escrew Service.Worried about getting scammed on an Internet auction? "Just use an escrow service," is the customary advice. Not so fast. The latest auction scam is an elaborate swindle involving creation of fake escrow services, complete with convincing Web sites like www.escrow-is.com
posted by srboisvert
on Jul 9, 2002 -
2 comments

The TouchGraph GoogleBrowser uses Google's related: links to visualize local maps of the web. Enter www.metafilter.com and watch the spider unfurl its arms. Click on "Show Singles" for more specific pages, or set the "radius" to 10 for more nodes. (Full instructions are here. ) Requires something called the Java Virtual Machine and may be IE-only, but that doesn't matter: my neighbors just called to ask if I was going to keep whooping like that all night.
posted by gleuschk
on Jul 2, 2002 -
25 comments

Want to see my content? It'll cost you your anonymity.Mandatory registration is making the rounds at major online news sites, as media companies try to peel away the Internet's cloak of anonymity and build closer relationships with their customers. But it's a tricky dance, and one that risks alienating news junkies when they bump into registration walls as they surf from site to site.
Registration also throws up roadblocks for weblogs, community news sites, discussion boards and e-mail newsletters that point to news articles.
posted by srboisvert
on Jun 29, 2002 -
24 comments

The Library of Congress blew it. I watched some of the hearings about the CARP-proposed webcasting fees, and I had the impression that the people at the Library got it. I was wrong. So instead of having all their limbs chopped off, webcasters can now expect only to be cut off at the knees. The end result will be the same, though; say goodbye to Internet radio.
posted by geneablogy
on Jun 20, 2002 -
30 comments

First JPEG virus discovered... "The W32/Perrun virus, as it is now being called, extracts data from JPEG files and then injects picture files with infected digital images. A fair warning to those individuals who are fond of sending multimedia files to friends and families." Is everyone's porn stash threatened now?
posted by darian
on Jun 14, 2002 -
28 comments

Etherlinx, plans to offer high-speed wireless access to the Internet at inexpensive prices. (NYT) Without venture capital backing, in a garage just six blocks from the garage where Steven P. Jobs and Stephen Wozniak launched Apple Computer 26 years ago, Mr. Holt is making his clever and inexpensive radio repeater by modifying inexpensive Wi-Fi cards, the circuitry that sends and receives the signals. Their ambitious target: the cable and phone companies that currently hold a near-monopoly on high-speed access for the "last mile" between the Internet and the home.
posted by semmi
on Jun 10, 2002 -
2 comments

Next move - nationalizing the internet infrastructure in Europe ? 300 staff and union officials have blockaded themselves at the network operations centre in Belgium following Dutch telecoms company KPNQwest bankruptcy filing. Stocked up on provisions, taking shifts unpaid to keep the centre fully operational. "If we leave, then in three to five days there will be the largest internet slowdown in European history." From the article - KPNQwest's infrastructure covers 60 cities around Europe, estimated between one third and one half of all European internet traffic.
posted by Voyageman
on Jun 7, 2002 -
10 comments

I must admit, I've always had my doubts about some of you... Corporations hire viral marketing firms to spread misinformation and bogus votes of support for their products on internet message boards. With all the front page entries about new movies, new records and new colored cola drinks, are we all being manipulated and duped by the marketing weasels even here on Metafilter?
posted by crunchland
on Jun 5, 2002 -
82 comments

Blogging for credit.... We've had some interesting posts about weblogs on MeFi today - is there room for one more? This one is about a credit course offered at UC Berkeley (of course) on weblogs and weblogging.
posted by Lynsey
on Jun 3, 2002 -
1 comment

Project Euh is a self-proclaimed multimedia weblog with many "web experiments" and something I never though I'd see, a curved scroll bar. But that's just the beginning. Click on euh? to load a random experiment.
posted by dgeiser13
on May 28, 2002 -
16 comments

About damn time. If I ever get another email asking me to go to Nigeria on behalf of Mr.Ngkoskusomethingoranother for some large sum of cash I could just...
posted by lostbyanecho
on May 24, 2002 -
12 comments

Google Labs is a public beta testing area for some pretty cool things they are currently working on: an amazing glossary, voice search by telephone, search results navigated without the mouse and finding additional items to sets defined by words you enter.
With every new feature, they seem to be getting even further beyond the competition. Even though Google is very likable company: is a monopoly on web search a good thing?
posted by c3o
on May 21, 2002 -
45 comments

Building Internet Intuition.
"One cannot overemphasize the importance of discipline and a clear research agenda in using the Internet." - Bill Arkin
"The basic rule is to dig deeper into links when pages are getting more relevant, but not when they are taking you far afield from the original query."
posted by sheauga
on May 19, 2002 -
9 comments

May 1st Reboot. On April 25, participating sites shut down and post a Reboot Holder, until May 1st, at which time they relaunch. Why?
Upon review of all of this year's participating sites, a good number of them are not using the required Reboot Holder. Most have simply continued with normal operations and even made updates as recently as this afternoon.
posted by Su
on Apr 29, 2002 -
15 comments

Here's a nice, nice internet radio station that may keep you from your work for the rest of the day. I just got through listening to Boards Of Canada, now its playing Destroyer! Wow. listen
posted by protocool
on Apr 19, 2002 -
16 comments

New York's Natural History Museum Pioneers Use of Internet2 "Sebastien Lepine, a post-doctoral fellow at the museum, had figured that it would take him a year, using the commercial Internet, to finish downloading two 360-degree digital sky surveys for his study of fast-moving stars. But that was before the museum connected to Abilene."
This indication of how the "commmercial Internet" has become so clogged with crap annoys me intensely. Particularly when the article points out just a few of the research projects that need high bandwidth.
posted by elgoose
on Apr 17, 2002 -
13 comments

I just finished e-filing my taxes and I want to tell you about it! It has been, without qualification, the worst Internet experience I've ever had. The Quicken/Intuit software was confusing, my ISP and/or the Quicken server timed out and I had to re-log on about 20 times and the software requires far more intrusive answers (like email address & phone number) than any paper forms I've ever used. Anyone have a good experience e-filing or one more like mine?
posted by Lynsey
on Apr 15, 2002 -
49 comments

This orthopaedic surgery site seems more like a design exercise than an actual attempt at an informative site. Imagine that someone told you to make the site using poor technology choices, couple it with non-professional content not conducive to trusting the doctors, and add a map to the office that does more to enable chuckles than get people to into the business. It's so bad, it's good, and most definitely do not skip intro on this one.
posted by mathowie
on Apr 13, 2002 -
32 comments

The ThreeRing Web Mapping project adds a dot to a blank canvas showing your geographic location (or that of your ISP, as best it can guess based on your IP address). They've also got a code snippet to put on your own site that automagically adds your visitors to the map. The US is already clearly defined, Europe is getting there, and Oceania is coming into view. (They've also got one of them Tag-Board thingies, which is painful to read for any length of time.)
posted by gleuschk
on Apr 5, 2002 -
26 comments

...those Google/Scientology articles I wrote didn't get nearly as many links from blogs... but they were of much broader interest to readers than the blog articles, so when a few major media sites linked to them, they got a ton of traffic.

Major media sites have to appeal to a common denominator, while smaller sites (MeFi) can focus on quality and thought provoking content. Is there any wonder there's less people interested in the specifics?
posted by KnitWit
on Apr 5, 2002 -
12 comments

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